AI-100 : Preparing for the Azure AI Engineer certification

Written on November 1, 2020

Estimated reading time : 4 mins

Tags : | azure | certification | cloud |

In a hurry ? Please skip to the part you want with the index below.

• Background
• Preparation
  • Cloud Academy
  • Udemy practice tests
• Scheduling the exam
• Pre-exam process [Warning:Stress ahead!]
• The AI-100 exam
• Final thoughts

Background

“Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.” - Robert Boyce

AI-100 is the Azure AI Engineer exam. I cleared the exam today ie Nov 1, 2020. This is my 3rd Azure certification. You can read about the others here.

I recently worked on Azure bot services for a project. It got me interested in Azure’s cognitive services. After my employer organized a related training session on AI-100, I got the drive to go for this certifrication.

Preparation

Skills measured :

• Analyze solution requirements (25-30%)
• Design AI solutions (40-45%)
• Implement and monitor AI solutions (25-30%)

As you see - this needs a lot of foundation knowledge (Azure + data engineering). I found 50% of the exam questions to involve the fundamentals of Azure. The rest was a mix of cogntitive services and other supporting tools. The exam is targeted for a data engineer who is comfortable with Azure. Since I cleared AZ-300 and AZ-301 recently, I too found the exam to be easy . But it still involved going through a lot of course material !

There aren’t many AI-100 courses out there. But couple of websites which helped me prepare :

Cloud Academy

• I recommend the AI-100 learning path.
• Its well focused and short (5 hrs or so).
• The course focuses on Azure’s cognitive services and some of the supporting tools.
• Its expected for the audience to know the basics of Azure.

Udemy practice tests

• This offering helped me a lot.
• The 5 practice tests are really good and test your knowledge well. They also point out chinks in your Azure knowhow quite a bit.
• The duration of each test was around 1 hour each though I completed each test within 30 min.

Scheduling the exam

You can schedule the exam through the Microsoft Certification Dashboard page.

Pre-exam process [Warning:Stress ahead!]

Like AZ-301, this was a bit of a stressful experience for me. I did the pre-exam prep below around 20 min before the exam :

• I had to download a software which tested my machine for compatibility.
• Send pics from 4 directions of my surroundings (closed room).
• After a live 360 degrees scan from the Proctor, The exam was supposed to begin.
• The pre exam profile questionaire wrapped up quickly.
• However here it got a bit stressful
  • The software stopped working after it couldn’t stop some background app. It had me waiting for some response…but to no avail.
  • The supervisor mentioned some tech issue on the Mac version of the software and gave me a voucher to give the exam some other time in the future.
  • Scheduling the exam a 2nd time after 5 days didnt help. This time the app got stuck at ‘Loading’…and no amount of hitting the ‘retry’ button helped. Got another voucher again and rescheduled the exam after 3 days again.

The AI-100 exam

• It was an exam of 3 hours with 30 questions and passing score of 70%.
• Since I had completed the practice tests well in advance, I knew that time wasnt an issue for me.
• The practice test experience helped. Found a lot of similar questions from the tests.
• I submitted the exam in 30 min. Completed the questions in 25 min. Spent 5 min reviewing the questions about whom I wasn’t sure about.
• I had to fill a survey on myself and nature of the exam after this (no impact on the exam results).
• I immediately received the congratulatory message page for clearing the exam.

The exam report with certification id arrived in 10 minutes.

Final thoughts

• I loved studying for A1-100. It really improves your basics on data engineering and reference architectures.
• I think I might go for the data engineer path of certifications as my current work is pushing me towards it + I found it quite interesting when studying for AI-100.
• Besides the main cognitive services, I focused on smaller topics which helped :
  • Azure reference architectures for AI (especially IoT and real time analytics use cases).
  • Azure on the Edge.
  • Machine learning concepts and tooling.
  • Azure Stream analytics.
  • HDInsight (Hadoop, Spark, Storm, Hive, Kafka etc).
  • Data Factory and Data Bricks.
• Practice tests help a lot to identify chinks in your armour. Give as many as possible and multiple times if needed.

I wish you the best of luck if you plan on giving this exam .
Feel free to share your experiences. Every bit of knowledge helps .